February 3/00 6:18 am - Barry 5th in TdL Stage 9

Posted by Editor on 02/3/00

Today was a good day at the Tour de Langkawi for Canadian Mike Barry (Saturn), who finished fifth in a breakaway, but a bad day for Team Canada, who lost Matt Anand from the race and had Paul Kelly drop 19 minutes after breaking his chain. Guido Trenti (Cantina Tollo) took the sprint from Henk Vogels (Mercury) for the stage.

The 115 kilometre ninth stage was expected to be fast, with the peloton putting the pressure on Mercury one last time before the race-deciding Genting Highlands stage tomorrow. Attacks started immediately after the end of the neutral zone, and 10 kilometres into the race the right combination of riders broke free, and stayed away for the rest of the day.

Fifteen riders, fifteen teams, nobody closer than 9 minutes to race leader Chris Horner (Mercury) - it was a break that was bound to succeed. The group went away very quickly, and was nearly 5 minutes up by the 30 kilometre mark. Saturn had Barry in the break, and Mercury had sent along Australian sprinter Vogels to keep an eye on things

Mercury began to work a bit at that point to keep things in check, and were later joined by Mroz to maintain tempo at the front of the peloton. For everyone else, it was just a matter of sitting in and enduring the 33 plus Celcius heat.

While the gap yo-yo'd between 4 and 5 minutes, with every rider but Vogels working together smoothly, there was never any danger of it getting caught. 10 kilometres before the finish (in Kajang, on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur), Mike Barry starting jumping, and managed to reduce the odds to 6 - himself, Trenti, Vogels, Torsten Schmidt (Gerolsteiner), Artour Babaitsev (Nurnberger) and Thierry Gouvenou (Big Mat Auber 93).

Coming into the finish, it was Gouvenou who initiated the sprint with Vogels coming off him and Trenti just nipping the Mercury rider at the line. The main pack rolled in 5:27 later.

Race Notes:

- Gord Fraser (Mercury) got into a mild altercation during the race with a Cantina Tollo rider. "One of them spat on Floyd (Landis). I went back to talk with him about it aggressively. Him being Italian, he couldn't back down either, so we had a bit of shoving. I don't what it is with those guys, they've been onto us for a few days now."

- Matt Anand is down as a DNF, but the reality is that he was DQed by an official for holding onto a bottle a little too long (and thus getting a tow). Theoretically, team manager Jacques Landry was also kicked out, but after discussing things with the commissaire after the race he was allowed back in. Hopefully the bad luck is now over.

- There was one minute of silence prior to the start of the stage, after it was learned that international commissaire Wim Jeremiasse had died in an automobile accident the day before . Jeremiasse was the Commissaire President of the 1999 Tour de Langkawi.